Johnny felt something inside that was almost but not quite like sorrow. ‘That would be my pleasure,’ he said.
‘Thanks. I’m glad I’ve … that I’ve said everything that’s on my mind. I feel better than I have in a long, long time.’
‘Have you set a date?’
‘As a matter of fact, we have. How does January 2 sound to you?’
‘Sounds good,’ Johnny said. ‘You can count on me.’
‘We’re going to put both places on the market, I guess,’ Herb’ said. ‘We’ve got our eye on a farm in Biddeford. Nice place. Twenty acres. Half of it woodlot. A new start.’
‘Yes. A new start, that’s good.’
‘You wouldn’t have any objections to us selling the home place?’ Herb asked anxiously.
‘A little tug,’ Johnny said. ‘That’s all.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I feel. A little tug.’ He smiled. ‘Somewhere around the heart, that’s where mine is. What about you?’
‘About the same,’ Johnny said.
‘How’s it going down there for you?’
‘Good.’
‘Your boy’s getting along?’
‘Amazin well,’ Johnny said, using one of his father’s pet expressions and grinning.
‘How long do you think you’ll be there?’
‘Working with Chuck? I guess I’ll stick with it through the school year, if they want me.
Working one-on one has been a new kind of experience. I like it. And this has been a really good job. Atypically good, I’d say.’
‘What are you going to do after?’
Johnny shook his head. ‘I don’t know yet. But I know one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m going out for a bottle of champagne. We’re going to get bombed.’
His father had stood up on that September evening and clapped him on the back. ‘Make it two,’ he said.
He still got the occasional letter from Sarah Hazlett. She and Walt were expecting their second child in April. Johnny wrote back his congratulations and his good wishes for Walt’s canvass. And he thought sometimes about his afternoon with Sarah, the long, slow afternoon.
It wasn’t a memory he allowed himself to take out too often; he was afraid that constant exposure to the sunlight of recollection might cause it to wash out and fade, like the reddish-tinted proofs they used to give you of your graduation portraits.
He had gone out a few times this fall, once with the older and newly divorced sister of the girl Chuck was seeing, but nothing had developed from any of those dates.
Most of his spare time that fall he had spent in the company of Gregory Ammas Stillson.
He had become a Stillsonphile. He kept three looseleaf notebooks in his bureau under his socks and underwear and T-shirts. They were filled with notes, speculations, and Xerox copies of news items.
Doing this had made him uneasy. At night, as he wrote around the pasted-up clippings with a fine-line Pilot pen, he sometimes felt like Arthur Bremmer or the Moore woman who had tried to shoot Jerry Ford. He knew that if Edgar Lancte, Fearless Minion of the Effa Bee Eye, could see him doing this, his phone, living room, and bathroom would be tapped in a jiffy. There would be an Acme Furniture van parked across the street, only instead of being full of furniture it would be loaded with cameras and mikes and God knew what else.
He kept telling himself that he wasn’t Bremmer, that Stilison wasn’t an obsession, but that got harder to believe after the long afternoons at the UNH library, searching through old newspapers and magazines and feeding dimes into the photocopier. It got harder to believe on the nights he burned the midnight oil, writing out his thoughts and trying to make valid connections. It grew well-nigh impossible to believe on those graveyard-ditch three A.M.’s when he woke up sweating from the recurring nightmare.
The nightmare was nearly always the same, a naked replay of his handshake with Stillson at the Trimbull rally. The sudden blackness. The feeling of being in a tunnel filled with the glare of the onrushing headlight, a head-light bolted to some black engine of doom.
The old man with the humble, frightened eyes administering an unthinkable oath of
office. The nuances of feeling, coming and going like tight puffs of smoke. And a series of brief images, strung together in a flapping row like the plastic pennants over a used-car dealer’s lot. His mind whispered to him that these images were all related, that they told a picture-story of a titanic approaching doom, perhaps even the Armageddon of which Vera Smith had been so endlessly confident.